Megalithic shipping and trade routes

[Mick Harper]

That is an extremely large claim. No demotic languages (ie ones that are spoken today) were definitely written down until (maybe) the twelfth century, could be later. The Irish achieved what nobody else could do about seven hundred years before anybody else managed it. Unless, as you say, they were making it up. However, in order to make it up they would have had to alphebetise their own language -- something nobody else etc etc. Except the Normans. Or if you are correct the Normans and the Irish. Are you going to put in a bid for the Welsh who are in the same coracle as the Irish?

[Boreades]

Putting another boot in, in a slightly different direction, I was crestfallen to discover that the Ogham Tree Calendar is also most likely to be another fabrication. At best, a pretty but fanciful reinterpretation of wishful thinking by Robert Graves.

Modern pagans are wont to promote a certain "Celtic Tree Calendar" which has thirteen months, named for trees, based upon the ogham alphabet. Some of them assert that the Celts followed this calendar, and that proof of this can be found in the existence of ogham, and in the works of Robert Graves. Unfortunately, this is as false as the assertion that the druids built Stonehenge.

http://www.maryjones.us/jce/celtictreecalendar.html

It has hitherto not been my practice to directly criticise Graves nor his acolytes. As a novelist and poet, Graves' work is much to be admired and his two-volume study of The Greek Myths (1955) is highly regarded. There is even much in The White Goddess that is praiseworthy. It can be said that Graves' work is a fascinating attempt at an anthropological and mythological study which, had he had some scholastic advice, might have resulted in an interesting contribution in the mould of Joseph Campbell's work.
...
However, when he asked for advice from a reputable scholar in the field of Celtic Studies and specifically Ogham research, he rejected it because it did not support his prefixed notions. As I have often pointed out, the old Irish proverb runs Oscar cách i gceird araile - in free translation, everyone is a beginner at another's trade or craft. Graves, as someone who studied Classics for one year at St. John's College, Oxford, 1913, before enlisting in the army (on his return to university he switched from Classics and took his degree in English Language and Literature), should have been the first to realise that to write a study on Greek mythology and its early linguistic expression without knowing a word of Greek was not only an impertinence but would lead one into all sorts of errors.
...
On p.117 of The White Goddess Graves actually admits to the following:

'When recently I wrote on this subject to Dr MacAlister, as the best living authority on Oghams, he replied that I must not take O'Flaherty's alphabets seriously: 'they all seem to me to be late artificialities, or rather pedantries of little more importance than the affectations of Sir Pierce Shafton and his kind.' I pass on this caution in all fairness, for my argument depends on O' Flaherty's alphabet... I feel justified in supposing that O'Flaherty was recording a genuine tradition at least as old as the thirteenth century AD.' (My italics are placed in the passage to underline the enormity of what Robert Graves has done.) [Peter Beresford Ellis' emphasis]
...
A Celtic scholar is stunned, not only by his arrogant dismissal of the world's leading authority, but his last sentence. If Robert Graves thought the tree alphabet tradition only went back to the thirteenth century AD (the Book of Ballymote is actually late 14th Century), and that is precisely what MacAlister was warning him about, for we cannot trace it back beyond that time, how is he conjuring its use and claiming it as a mystical druidic calendar used in pre-Christian times?

Peter Beresford Ellis
http://cura.free.fr/xv/13ellis2.html

It's not going well for my neo-Druids. Bummer.

[Mick Harper]

That wraps it up.

[hvered]

Ogham appears to have only ever been used to 'write' people's names, sometimes a clan name, many of which would probably be unintelligible to anyone else anyway.

A common text would be something like Maqi Cairatini Avi Ineqaglasi meaning (of the) son of Cairthinn, grandson of Enechglass. The initial name is always in the genitive (possessive) case: this seems to imply that the stone belongs to the person named. In other words, it would be understood to mean something like “The stone of the son of Cairthinn, grandson of Enechglass”.

Ogham experts claim such stones may have been boundary markers or memorials which makes no sense. The script appears from nowhere only to be replaced more or less instantaneously by Latin ('Old Irish') a couple of hundred years later....sounds familiar.

[hvered]

Graves disowned his own 'tree alphabet' in the preface to the White Goddess I seem to remember. It's certainly not to be taken seriously but is fun to read as a myth.

[Boreades]

Are you going to put in a bid for the Welsh who are in the same coracle as the Irish?

Are you referring to Edward Williams/Iolo Morganwg? (More fabrications)

[Mick Harper]

Good Lord, no. I never go beyond the Normans for reprehensibility. It's a policy decision.

[TisILeclerc]

That is an extremely large claim. No demotic languages (ie ones that are spoken today) were definitely written down until (maybe) the twelfth century, could be later. The Irish achieved what nobody else could do about seven hundred years before anybody else managed it. Unless, as you say, they were making it up. However, in order to make it up they would have had to alphebetise their own language -- something nobody else etc etc. Except the Normans. Or if you are correct the Normans and the Irish. Are you going to put in a bid for the Welsh who are in the same coracle as the Irish?

I'm not sure what you are talking about.

I was talking about myth making amongst various aristocracies. And their origins.

[Mick Harper]

Personally I don't think the Normans were that clever. I'm quite happy to believe that the Irish could make their own stuff up for themselves.

This s more important than you know. I am saying the Irish (and the Welsh) have no history. It was all made up. In other words the Normans really were that clever. If you think the Irish made it up you will have to say which Irish, when and what did they make up. No generalities please.

[TisILeclerc]

If you look at the very old maps of Ireland you'll see populations of Brigantes and Dumnonni or whatever they call themselves and others.

So British tribes were in Ireland as we would expect considering that Ireland was once joined to Britain.

Apart from that Ireland was mostly Viking before the Flemish/Norman./Welsh got there to help McMurrough.

I don't think that we can stop the Irish and Welsh from having a genuine history of their own Just because it disagrees with something or other.

The Normans were clever but not that clever at all. They were devious and they still are otherwise they wouldn't be in power.

However, the Welsh, Irish and English had and have a history in spite of the Normans.